


like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing

by billspilledquill



Category: 19th Century CE RPF, Literary RPF
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Nature, Percy Shelley’s funeral was a shit show really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-06-07 09:12:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15215927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/billspilledquill/pseuds/billspilledquill
Summary: Like all Romantics, Percy Shelley dies, but only a little.





	like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing

**Author's Note:**

> This is written because someone (Percy Shelley) couldn’t stay alive today.

 

_Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead_  
_Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing._

_—Ode To The West Wind_

 

“Do you think that I have indulged you so far?” Mary said. “Because I am only following my own tread of thoughts.”

She has always looked beautiful in the sun, but they weren’t bathing in the sunlight now. Percy leaned toward her, unperturbed. Percy was dense with madness or fever, or both.

“Dearest,” he started. “It’s three in the morning.”

Her hair was untangled, and not long enough for him to feel the silk river in his hands. She kissed him on the cheek, her lips cold and dry. He dreamt of her being a ghost, of her having eyes on her nipples, of her leaving again. He didn’t say, letting the moon drown them into silence once and for all.

If Mary was goddess, she would be Artemis. Her arms pitched high, her spear right through his heart. And like all Romantics, Shelley would die, but only a little.

“It is,” she said, her voice tight. “I need to get up now.”

He went back to sleep to the sounds of her scribbling. Nightmares ensued.

 

*

 

Shelley didn’t understand, exactly. He thought that it was beautiful, the river, Geneva and all the rest. He thought that it was beautiful to choose not to understand, also, a lot of things that don’t require learning. Byron seemed to agree with him.

George hummed against the swift arrows of birds in the sky. Percy had his hands behind his head, balancing on the small boat of Geneva river.

“I have been reading about water,” he said softly to himself or George. “You must think me ignorant, but I haven’t any idea of how movements are formed before.”

He can’t see Byron’s expression with his face toward the cerulean sky, but he assumed that it was mirth. He was easily amused in private settings like these.

“I must admit that I don’t know myself,” he said, not at all ashamed. “There are matters that I have devoted more time on, let’s say.”

He did his best to shrug in the small confinement of a wooden leave mould. “It’s fairly easy once the subject matter is grappled.” He explained, nonchalant. “The earth moves as the wind rises. The water follows its direction. See?” He said, touching the water with his fingertips. “It’s easy.”

“Nature is not an easy matter.”

“If you are nature, then no,” he said.

He heard Byron’s short laugh. He will sound breathless after that, as if laughing required a much greater energy from his lungs. Shelley let his hand dip into the river completely.

“I have never pegged you for a dreamer.”

“You clearly haven’t met me then, my friend.”

“If I liked you talentless and unimaginative, I wouldn’t have liked you at all.”

He smiled to the soft blow of wind, his hair damped by the water residing on the bottom of the boat. “Was that a compliment?”

Byron’s face came into view, his jaw resting on the raft. His lashes fluttering, wherever tired or just composing poems in his head, he didn’t know.

“Yes,” he said. “Now it’s your turn.”

“Humm,” he said, thinking. He licked his lips. “You don’t make me see things, sometimes.”

Byron arched a thick eyebrow. “What could they be?”

“Sometimes,” he said, voice conspicuously low. “Sometimes Frederick The Great talks to me.”

“When you are asleep,” he mused.

“He talks to me about the flowers, and how he has wasted so much time living,” he said, not denying. “I can hear voices. But when you are here,” he said, watching those dark hair tangling, attaching itself to nature. “You are the only voice that is loud enough.”

There is gratitude in Byron’s eyes. “I’m flattered.”

He kissed him on the cheek, the touch making him dose off to sleep. “You’re loud, George. You make your presence heard.”

“Not the only place where I am loud,” George said.

He went back to sleep with the sound of Byron’s breathing. Day dreams ensued.

 

*

 

Mary loved him, he knew. She loved all kinds of things, mostly dead ones. He wondered if she will still love him if he dies.

But like all dead things, he presumed that she will, but quietly so.

 

*

 

So he supposed that he will die, and hypothetically, if he did, the sea will swallow him whole. The captain was telling him to tie something, to do _something_. He stopped the man before it was too late.

This was not suicide, this was nature killing her sons. There was a line in the Iliad, he thought when the waves came back again, a word for the nature of things.

He was swimming, or just dozing off again. He clutched his chest, thought that it was time to say something worthy of poetry, of tombstone, but he choked, spluttering not verses but water. John Keats was laughing at him in his pocket, the poems.

The waves, the waves, the waves. Maybe it was in the Odyssey, after all. He chanted an ode to the west, to the wind, to his drowning, thinking that someone should make an allegory of this, one day. His heart was tight with words, but his throat trapped them in his thoughts.

This was the moment of splendor, the thunderstorm, the waves, the ship. The ship sank, and the thunder broke loose. All around him was poetry, all around him was water, the earth moved, the wind rose. The sea swallowed her children, but poetry stayed.

This, was a vindication of all beautiful things, this, was poetry.

So he supposed that he will die, but in the damp clothes he wore, Keats’ poems thud in his chest. It reminded him something about Homer, something about a line in his epic. Just a little.

 

*

 

He was reminded that maybe hearts remain a subject of alexandrian writing, that they hardened, wrapped around Adonis, and nature drowned her poet, but not her lover.

That _I stay, I stay, I stay._

 

*

 

Byron swam during his funeral. He loved him, he knew. Always, uncharacteristically, quietly so.

 

 


End file.
